Web 2.0 News & Articles

The announcement that Kapow Technologies (news, site) has just put the latest version of its Web Data Server -- better known as its  Mashup Server -- on general release should be of interest to anyone who is looking at their Web 2.0 apps for cost savings.

While a lot of companies claim a lot of things about their products, Kapow Technologies' financial success and growth over the past two years has backed up those claims principally as a result of some very serious software.

With the v7.0 release Mashup Server boasts enhanced scalability and performance -- and there are few other interesting bonuses as well.

We’ve exhausted our clever browser wars word play, so we’ll just come right out and say it: Firefox 3.5 was released for download today. 

The anticipated release comes one year after the launch of Firefox 3, and is being described by its creators as “the best performing browser Mozilla has ever released.” While that may be true—and has certainly got us geeks excited—those seeking one single rock-your-socks feature will be sorely disappointed. It appears that Firefox 3 isn’t about pulling ahead with fancy new functionality, rather, it’s about catching up.

Monday mantra: You can’t fix what you don’t measure.

At least, that’s the idea played on by Alistair Croll and Sean Power in their new book, Complete Web Monitoring. O'Reilly Media's new 662 page gem promises to show you how to transform missed opportunities, frustrated users, and spiraling costs into online success.

Said to be suitable for anyone who owns a website, Complete Web Monitoring will help you to:

• Discover how visitors use and interact with your site through web analytics, segmentation, conversions, and user interaction analysis
• Find out your market's motivations with voice-of-the-customer research
• Measure the health and availability of your website with synthetic testing and real-user monitoring
• Track communities related to your online presence, including social networks, forums, blogs, microblogs, wikis, and social news aggregators
• Understand how to assemble this data into clear reports tailored to your organization and audience

"This is a very comprehensive view of just about everything one needs to know about how websites work and what one needs to know about them. I'd like to make this book required reading for every employee at Gomez,” said Imad Mouline, CTO of Gomez.

For more information on this book, including author bios and the table of contents, check it out here. 

 While most companies are frantically scrambling around, trying their hardest to throw together something—anything— that will squeeze a fortune out of the social media phenomenon, there are a select few that’ve quietly been working in the background for awhile. Sysomos, a company based in Toronto, is one example.

Sysomos’ two social media analytics tools, Media Analysis Platform (MAP) and Heartbeat, were released earlier this month after being under the hood for a whopping 3+ years. MAP is a feature-heavy tool for analyzing media conversations, and Heartbeat is like the no-frills, less expensive version for those who crave only the essentials.

Opera (news, site) was talking about re-inventing the Web recently and its latest release, version 10, isn't just a browser. It's a whole new technology called Opera Unite, featuring a web server in the browser.

In March this year when Magnolia (news, site) released v4.0 of its web content management system, the company’s CTO Boris Kraft said that while they were happy with the new product, there would be always room for improvement.

Three months later those improvements have come with the first official and complete release of  v4.1. While there are a number of new features, particularly in the enterprise edition, most of the enhancements can be found in new modules with the Standard Templating Kit (STK).

Let's take a look at what else is new.

Two weeks ago, everybody was talking about it. It manhandled the blogosphere, was a trending topic on Twitter, and whispers of it could still be heard coming from the mouths of various Gilbane SF attendees last week.

And, OK, we admit it; Google Wave romanced us a little, too. But now that the smoke has cleared and Wave has had ample time to settle into the ‘net, the inevitable troop of naysayers has surfaced. Let’s check out what they have to say:

SeeWhy Inc (news, site), providers of an interesting little tracking/Web analytics tool that attempts to convert website abandoners, recently announced a new CEO. The newly appointed Scott G. Silk will be in charge of SeeWhy’s daily operations as well as shaping the overall vision and direction for the new team.

SeeWhy also reportedly plans to expand its focus beyond research and development by beefing up its sales and marketing sectors. Luckily, prior to SeeWhy, Silk was president and CEO of Action Engine Corp. where he established the company’s mobile application platform and oversaw their eventual sale to Mobui Corp. His expectations of his new job seem pretty positive as well:

“SeeWhy is in the right place at the right time with best-in-class technology,” he said. “In a down economy, everybody’s focused on cost-effective revenue generation. We deliver a compelling ROI in a SaaS delivery model. Considering that up to 70 percent of ecommerce customers abandon a session before they buy, our software can basically double a company’s online sales—without any capital expenditure. With more and more business being done over the web, my job is to exploit our unfair advantage in web conversion.”

With 20+ years of experience leading technology companies under Silk's belt, it looks like SeeWhy is in good hands, but will abandonment tracking really be the next big thing? As we reported earlier, there's a lot of uncertainty around the new tactic. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

O'Reilly Media has released a new book on Web 2.0. Called Web 2.0 Architectures, this book should help you understand better the inner workings of Web 2.0 from a technology perspective and how some online services today have been successful with this model.

The book was written by James Governor (founder of RedMonk), Dion Hinchcliffe (Hinchcliffe and Company) and Duane Nickull (tech evangelist for Adobe Systems), all three strongly versed in the workings of enterprise architecture.

If you want to understand how Web 2.0 applications are built and how you can take advantage of this type of architecture, then this book should provide you with a lot of information to build on:

• A Web 2.0 model: The evolution of the Web 2.0 model.
• Web 2.0 reference architecture: Understand the breakdown, or components, of basic Web 2.0 patterns.
• Specific Web 2.0 patterns: Understand how your business can take advantage of Web 2.0 patterns such as SOA, mashups, RIAs, SaaS, Semantic Web, Folksonomies and more.

The book includes reviews of some of the most successful Web 2.0 ventures today including Flickr, Akamai and Napster. It also looks at more generic technologies like blogs and wikis, content management systems and directories and tagging.

If you are looking to understand Web 2.0 from a marketing perspective, this may not be the book for you. But if you are a web architect, business analyst or someone who wants to build your own Web 2.0 website or solution, there is bound to be some information in this book to get you started.

The hard cover version of Web 2.0 Architectures costs US$ 34.99, but you can also get a e-version for a little less and maybe save a tree. Get more information here.

At the tail end of this year’s Gilbane conference was a topic that, no matter which industry you’re in, should be at the top of your list of priorities: Delivering Customer Experience in Challenging Times. Or, as we like to put it, How to Keep Getting Money out of Penny-Pinching People.

Moderating the panel was Leonor Ciarlone a Lead Analyst in Content Globalization at Gilbane Group, and speakers were Nic McMahon, VP Global Technology Solutions, Lionbridge and Natasja Paulssen, a partner at Ordina Consulting.

While the launch of FatWire’s Content Server v7.5 (news, site) in December was the first major upgrade of the Web CMS vendor's content management solution in 12 months, only six months later they have unveiled two new solutions that will greatly extend v7.5 abilities.

On the one hand it has released the latest version of their advanced collaboration platform in TeamUp 3.1, while on the other, it has unveiled an upgrade to their content sharing solution - Content Integration Platform 1.5 - for sharing content stored in disparate repositories.

Between them, FatWire says, the new solutions will cut the costs of sharing and reusing content, while at the same time making it easier to share that content across an enterprise-wide Web CMS.

Social media. This particular phenomenon is arguably the biggest thing on the Web right now, and it’s getting bigger every day. In fact, it’s difficult to imagine being active on the Web without somehow participating in social media.

But, on the off chance that you’ve completely missed the social media bus and you’re scrambling to figure out exactly why it’s taking the Web by storm, take solace in knowing that you’re not alone. John Stone of Crosstech Partners held a workshop at this year’s Gilbane SF Conference to explain the bare bone basics.

Statistically, Flock (news, site) is like the little browser that could, but didn’t. Translate that into numbers and you get 7.5 million people that have downloaded the browser, but only 1.1 million that actively use it.

So, why does Flock keep Flopping? Well, we’re not really sure. Dubbed the social Web browser, Mozilla-powered Flock is made up of all the things we typically love: integrated social networking, micro-blogging, chat, etc. Will the newly released 2.5 version be enough to finally take flight? Let’s take a look at the fresh features:

It has often been said that you can prove anything with statistics. If that is in fact the case, then the results of a new survey will prove what many people know already -- companies are still throwing money at web content management systems.

What is striking about this survey however, is that many companies this year are spending, or plan to spend, their CMS budgets on implementation rather than licensing.

The CMS Survey Report 2009, published by UK-based Econsultancy in association with Australia-based Squiz.net (news, site) also shows that companies are doing this because they don’t believe they are getting a high-enough ROI from their existing CMS.

Both e-mail and instant messaging are pretty basic ideas. Originally designed back in the ‘60s, the two electronic earth-shakers were made to replace what we had back then: the telephone and snail mail.

Consider what we have now: blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. Is it possible our faithful forms of communication are outdated? Google (news, site) thinks so. In an attempt to infuse old ideas with new technology once again, Google Wave is born. The communication service is a sort of e-mail, collaboration, instant messaging, networking mashup, and Google’s idea of what e-mail would look like if it were designed today.

As per usual for Big G, the tool is already making waves.